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- Convenors:
-
Stuart McLean
(University of Minnesota)
Maxime Le Calvé (Humboldt University in Berlin, ExC Matters of Activity)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 23 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
How might fleeting yet transformative moments be made more central to accounts of the world, not as secondary to and derivative of states of permanence, but as a constitutive part of collective life? We seek submissions in the form of ethnography, creative writing, or audiovisual/performance pieces.
Long Abstract:
“It is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary.” Poet Frank O’Hara evokes a moment of intimacy seemingly at odds with the solidity and permanence of monumental artworks. How might such fleeting yet transformative moments be accorded a more central place in our accounts of the world? Reality is often easier to describe in terms of enduring presences and stable conditions, yet to focus exclusively on these overlooks so much: fleeting moods, meteorological fluctuations, glimpses in passing, visionary states, unexpected encounters with humans and other beings. What if any are the traces these leave? How might they relate to the more knowing ephemerality of artistic performances, political protests, or transitory but recurring occasions like festivals? Suggestions for approaching such moments can be found in Turner’s “liminality,” Stewart’s “ordinary affects,” Benjamin’s flashing “dialectical image,” Moten’s black ”fugitivity,” Muñoz’s queer theorization of “ephemera as evidence,” or a range of contemporary art and performance practices. Building upon these insights, we are interested in contributions that explore the fleeting and transitory (along with their mobilization for creative, activist, or other purposes) not as secondary to and derivative of states of permanence but as profoundly constitutive of collective life, gesturing always to the possibility that things might be otherwise. Recognizing that the challenge posed is as much creative as descriptive or conceptual, we invite contributions in the form of ethnography, creative writing (ethno-fiction, poetry etc.) or audiovisual or performance pieces.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 23 July, 2024, -Stuart McLean (University of Minnesota)
Paper short abstract:
In contrast to the lyric orientation of much "anthropoetry," this presentation explores the possibilities of epic poetry (or what I call “minor epic”) as a mode attuned both to the worldly ephemerality of passing moments and to the cosmic changefulness of which they afford fleeting intimations.
Paper long abstract:
Anthropologists who have turned to poetry have often claimed to do so as a means of accessing emotional registers of which conventional academic prose is unable to avail. In other words, poetry is tacitly conflated with lyric poetry, today probably the most widely practiced poetic genre, and one associated in particular with the expression of inner feelings and subjectival states. Lyric poetry, however, is not the only kind of poetry. Epic is arguably the most ancient form of poetry, extending back beyond the advent of writing and taking as its subject matter not just the actions of gods, rulers, and heroes, but also in some cases the origins of the cosmos. Unlike lyric poetry (that has tended to direct its gaze inward) epic poetry, as British poet Alice Oswald has recently suggested, propels us “beyond the voice, beyond the mind, out in the pure, unsupervised space.” Since the nineteenth century the epic form has sometimes been appropriated for nationalist political ends, to provide an immemorial ground for a political community often envisioned in narrowly exclusionary terms. Yet epic also provides a potential challenge to such narrowness. Part manifesto and part collage of my own and others’ words and images, this presentation proposes and enacts a mode that I call “minor epic” as an alternative to both ethnonationalist triumphalism and lyric introspection. This involves a simultaneous attunement to the worldly ephemerality of passing moments and to the cosmic changefulness of which they afford fleeting intimations.
Petra Rethmann (McMaster University)
Paper short abstract:
What happens when the potentialities for political change are fleeting, and what are the possibilities of it being sustained? In examining short-lived public readings that artist-dissident perform in Moscow streets, I employ insights from studies of political disappointment and utopian thinking.
Paper long abstract:
What happens when the potentialities for political change are fleeting? What are the possibilities of it being sustained, especially when social conditions push towards a hardening of authoritarian power? And, why even continue engaging in such politics when it is clear that on its promise it might not deliver? In my contribution to this panel I trace possible answers to these questions by examining the politics of short-lived performances of public readings that Russian artist-dissidents deliver in Moscow streets. While artist-dissidents read a range of texts that stretch from Lev Tolstoy to Aleksandra Kollontai, I especially attend to readings that center on works by the anarcho-socialist writer Victor Serge (1890-1947). One reason Serge matters is because his own politics and time was defined by great political disappointments and hopes, and that in his writing he confronted disappointment head-on. In being guided by research on literature, disappointment, and art, as well as untimely desire, I argue that Moscow street readings are not a sign of nostalgic affects and moods, but a longing for fundamental change that outlasts a historical moment even when it might have been fulfilled.
In analyses of protest and dissent the ephemeral and fleeting is often seen as a sign of vulnerability, instead of radical resilience – a refusal to entirely give up. It may be about time to conceptualize the ephemeral not as inefficiency, but as an emerging sense of how to think about resilience and other possibilities to inhabit this world.
Megan Gette (University of Texas at Austin)
Paper short abstract:
With ethnographic attention to oil painting, star parties and darkness measurement against light pollution in the oilfields of the Permian Basin, I digress. In digressions, glow, blurs, “faint and fuzzy” things, glimpses and shadows show a concept forming in registers of exposure.
Paper long abstract:
"It is difficult to believe that anything that is completely solid can exist." — Lucretius
An object – a solid thing – is a relationship of light and matter. The infra or ultra designations on the electromagnetic spectrum denote scientific or physical realities for the nonhuman, and material and phenomenological possibility for the human. Thus, infra or ultra-things are compositional — existing as a realm of measurement or speculation (Lingus). Taking ‘composition’ to mean both the substance of something and the process by which it is perceived, an object is less solid than merely still – ‘unformed,’ subject to its shifting atmosphere (Stewart 2013).
It stands that “a poetics of air starts from a conception of air as ‘thick’” (Englemann 2014). The viscous “dissolves the distinction between matter and form,” and denotes thresholds of expressivity where thickness is felt (Didi-Huberman 2015 cf Simonetti 2021). More than entangled, its objects are imbued-with: breathing, chemically-saturated, blobs - relations without form, physicalities that shift form, becoming part or or moving as rhythm or refrain.
With ethnographic attention to oil painting, star parties and darkness measurement against encroaching light pollution in the oilfields of the Permian Basin, I digress. In poetic digressions, I theorize glow, blurs, “faint and fuzzy” things, glimpses, and shadows. “Speaking nearby” (Minh-Ha 1990) in whispers, eavesdropping, and tracing moments shows a concept forming in registers of exposure.
Thalia Gigerenzer (Princeton University)
Paper short abstract:
Weaving together creative writing and multimedia materials, this piece explores the way young women in low-income neighborhoods of Delhi, India, sought brief moments of "scene change" (change of scenery) in their everyday lives, pursuing fleeting but intense experiences of refreshment and novelty.
Paper long abstract:
On a hot afternoon in May, 2018, 23-year-old Gulnaz stepped onto the rooftop terrace of her family’s apartment in a low-income neighborhood of Delhi, India. Taking a brief moment of respite from housework, she took in the view, marveling at the way the elevated metro appeared to glitter in the distance. “Ah!” she exclaimed, “My mind is refreshed!” Weaving together photographs and creative, narrative ethnography, this piece will explore how young women in Delhi’s low-income neighborhoods sought moments of what they called “scene change” (change of scenery) in their lives, pursuing a sense of refreshment and novelty. Moments of “scene change” included, for example: a brief moment of respite on the rooftop; chasing after pockets of cool air in an ancient Mughal tomb. Though these moments were often fleeting, interrupted abruptly by familial obligations, many women told me that their lives would feel empty without them. While much scholarship on Muslim women has focused on themes of oppression and agency, I argue that these seemingly tiny moments were just as crucial. In these moments of “scene change,” women often became playful, transposing imaginative landscapes onto their surroundings—comparing the shape of a tree to an earring, for example. In addition to drawing on two years of fieldwork in Delhi’s low-income areas, I will incorporate the writings and photographs of the women themselves. In these wonderfully atmospheric writings, young women reflect on the aesthetic and imaginary pleasures of these moments on the rooftop, when the mundane appears to shimmer, ever so slightly.
Karen Lane (University of St Andrews)
Paper short abstract:
To understand urban life we must understand transient encounters despite the epistemological and methodological challenges to a discipline rooted in long-term participant observation. A chance meeting with a stranger (five minutes, few words) yields a story of love, bereavement and creature comfort.
Paper long abstract:
Walking through Belfast city centre with my dog. A man on a bench holds out his hand to her and looks at me. I smile, nod and sit down beside him. ‘She’s a lovely dog’, he says stroking her, ‘how old is she?’ ‘Eighteen months. Do you have a dog?’ He replies in two staccato words: ‘Dog. Dead.’ His eyes fill with tears. ‘I’m so sorry. What kind of dog?’ He struggles to speak but manages ‘Westie’. We sit in silence for few minutes while he strokes Torridon, then say goodbye and go our separate ways. Fleeting encounters with strangers are a mode of sociality central to urban life but this presents a challenge for anthropology, where fieldwork expectations are deeply rooted in long-term participant observation. Yet to understand urban life we must understand transient encounters. My meeting with this man was happenstance, our conversation only lasted a few minutes, but his words and gestures tell a painful story of love, bereavement and the comfort of creatures. A kind of oral flash fiction. Social scientists and philosophers have long been fascinated by the figure of the stranger as someone from elsewhere, an outsider, as straddling two social worlds, or as a threat, yet contemporary urban encounters with strangers are the rule not the exception and people learn to navigate these relationships with relative ease. This paper explores engagements with strangers, a dog as a research assistant, and the power of storytelling to create momentary ethnographic encounters worthy of anthropological attention.
Daniel Fisher (University of California, Berkeley)
Paper short abstract:
How might attention to fire’s image inform the ethnography of Australian fire ecology and carbon exchange? In addressing this question to the intimate and fragile impressions left by catastrophic fire, this paper also reflects on the fleeting glimpse as itself a compelling ethnographic form.
Paper long abstract:
In early 2020 Australia seemed consumed by fire. ‘The Black Summer fires’ engulfed the southeast, with significant fires also burning across the northwest of the country. As these gathered force, photojournalists, scientists, and artists produced a diverse set of images designed to lend these scale, offering a ground against which figures of catastrophe and crisis might be measured. In Sydney, however, smoke and falling ash brought distant bushfires near as intimates, offering impermanent, but no less impressive counterimages to the mass-mediated, spectacular flames of bushfire: Cinders and microparticles circulated in the city’s atmosphere, elevating medical risks of circulatory disorders, and impacting public health and finance for an unforeseeable future. It became hard to breathe.
This presentation begins with the image of one such cinder, a fragile impression produced in the context of ethnographic fieldwork on Indigenous fire management and carbon exchange. This cinder offers a potent figure through which to reconsider fire’s animacy, sociality, and power. Such fleeting images and impressions have become unexpected, but insistent interlocutors in this fieldwork, encouraging reconsideration of fire’s role as medium of climate change and carbon exchange: What becomes differently apparent through the cinder’s delicate, yet insistent imposition of memory and form? What other forms does fire take as image or impression? And how might attention to fire’s image reshape the ethnography of fire? In asking what images might demand of an ethnography of fire’s urban ecology and indigeneity the paper also reflects on what makes the fleeting glimpse so compelling as an interlocutor.
Daisy Couture (Princeton University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how patients and clinicians relate to uncertainty in the context of medically unexplained symptoms. Approaching uncertainty as a flickering, ephemeral polyphony, I argue that it can interrupt constricting regimes of thought in the clinic and generate possibilities for healing.
Paper long abstract:
Medical knowledge tends to be associated with certainty and solidity, however, medicine is foundationally uncertain; both suffering and recovery are slippery and often cannot be explained biomedically. ‘Medically unexplained symptoms’ refers to the phenomenon in which someone is seriously ill – e.g. seizures, complex pain, paralysis – but no pathophysiological cause can be found. Whether these cases are explained psychosomatically or neurologically, profound uncertainties in care and illness experience remain. While research has historically focused on the therapeutic benefits of certainty, this paper argues that uncertainty is not a cipher for ignorance, but rather a flicker, a simultaneous, if precarious and ephemeral, polyphony.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork with clinicians and patients with medically unexplained symptoms in a Canadian neuropsychiatric hospital, this paper argues that not only is uncertainty a fundamental aspect of medicine, its flickering, spectral nature also offers generative therapeutic possibilities. Exploring how patients and clinicians relate to this flickering in the clinic, I approach medical uncertainty not as the absence of knowledge, but as a slippery maybe – multiple possibilities (in terms of etiology, treatment, meaning) entwining and entangling, moving into sight and then out of view. Thinking with Despret, Didi-Hubermann, Stewart, and Benjamin, I consider how the flicker of uncertainty rejects the drive towards objectivity and control in the clinic and acts as a dialectic of healing in itself. Part ethnographic and part theoretical, this paper explores both the force of ephemeral, flickering things in suffering and recovery and how to write ethnographically about those flickers.
Maxime Le Calvé (Humboldt University in Berlin, ExC Matters of Activity)
Paper short abstract:
Like micro phenomenological interviews, live drawing can provide a common ground to turn flaky insights into more durable riddles, conjuring elusive moments into colourful keepers.
Paper long abstract:
Sponsored by a Danish foundation, the Experimenting, Experiencing, Reflecting project (EER) started from a transdisciplinary involvement with micro phenomenology. This interview method provides a common vocabulary and method to evaluate and dive into perceptive events. (Petitmengin 2016) Taking it as a common ground, a group of artistic research practitioners are merging their experimentations with those of neuroscience colleagues, and vice versa.
As I was invited to document one of their workshops with ethnographic sketches, my practice took place into a tapestry of many approaches geared toward the same poetic yet carefully qualified kind of shared exploration. The activities of two days sparkled with many daunting moments of perceptive insight. We stretched textiles to feel their ghostly figures, contemplated heaps of soil and lichens, played around with generative AI, engaged in neuro choreographies, and even played music. What is it that we really were gathered to do?
Like micro phenomenological interviews, live drawing can provide a common ground to turn flaky insights into more durable riddles, conjuring elusive moments into colourful keepers. Isabelle Stengers suggests that building upon an ecology of practices would foster respect and attention between modern science and other ways of knowing. (2023) More than a definite target for the project, the EER members claim to “hold a space” for their ideas to meet and transform. (Eliasson & Roepstorff 2022) What do these spaces look like, that can accommodate such precious inconstancies? How can we take care of them “on their own terms”?
Jerome Whitington (New York University)
Paper short abstract:
When a sinkhole opens up a fugitive void in a legacy coal mining community, I attempt to unravel its fleeting nature in contrast to forms of anthropocene play involving off-road vehicles, guns and fire, which offer their own momentary sense of euphoric enjoyment.
Paper long abstract:
Glen Lyon, Pennsylvania, sits in the southern corner of the anthracite coal fields of the Wyoming Valley, a former patch town or glorified labor camp for extensive underground and strip mines that closed up here by the early 1960s. In September 2023 a sinkhole opened up inside a housing complex, prompting a flurry of local news and speculation in a part of the country where I have been studying energy investment in legacy coal mining communities. When I subsequently paid a visit, the sinkhole had been closed up and filled in, but in fact the same hole had made an even more dramatic appearance some 40 years earlier. This paper discusses my attempt to ethnographically unravel a fugitive void in the underground, the fleeting nature of the sinkhole in contrast to the enduring legacies of a mineral substance that is ubiquitous in day-to-day life yet economically irrelevant. I juxtapose this against the forms of anthropocene play involving off-road vehicles, guns and fire, through which mostly men engage in physically intensive and intimate activities on the abandoned mine lands, the mountainous piles of mine refuse, and the feral, early-succession ecologies that have grown up over the past sixty or so years. I take this anthropocene play as a particular enactment of joussance, a fleeting sense of euphoric enjoyment or a bodily configuration of affect and enactment that is momentarily unqualified and affirming.
Valentina Zagaria (University of Manchester)
Paper short abstract:
The play is set in the microcosm of a Tunis taxi jama3i. As passengers get on and off, whizzing between marginalised and wealthy neighbourhoods, word of disappearances spreads. The gestures, looks, and thoughts exchanged among the strangers speak to the nature of disappearance in a volatile context.
Paper long abstract:
The play is set in the microcosm of a Tunis taxi jama3i. Minibuses take off incessantly from Bhar Lazrag – a chaotically built neighbourhood with poor infrastructure inhabited by Tunisians who migrated to the capital from the interior regions and by young people from other African countries. They link the neighbourhood at full speed with the wealthy quarters of Marsa – Le Protectorat de la Marsa, some call it, due to its concentrated population of French expats. The full ride barely takes 15 minutes. As different passengers get on and off, word of disappearances starts spreading. Tunisians being disappeared at sea by their country’s coastguards attempting to stop them from reaching Europe. People from other African countries being picked up from the street and deported to the desert borders with Libya and Algeria. Others disappearing in police stations. Entire taxi jama3i are rumoured to be disappearing too – or are they fleeing? The gestures, looks, and thoughts exchanged among those on board speak to transient but significant moments of solidarity among strangers in a volatile political context.
This ethnographic play infused with science fiction explores the workings of disappearance. It brings together the tangible ways in which people go about looking for loved ones, and the intangible ways in which disappearance manifests itself in beliefs as to what might have happened to the missing. It also draws attention to when the absences of strangers are felt – when, for instance, entire neighbourhoods like Bhar Lazrag are emptied out.